With the surge in popularity of the smart phones, social media sites like FourSquare, which offer ‘Geo location based Checkins’, are ones to watch. Foursquare allow users to ‘check in’ using mobile phones when they visit any location be it a cafe, library, office, shop, hotel etc. They can share their location with friends and win virtual badges for their activity ie: ‘ a mayor badge – for person who visits the location the most’. Find out more about Foursquare here.
The above image shows a hotel, local to our offices and a recommendation I gave; anyone who searched for ‘Hotel Du Vin’, on FourSquare, or who searches for 'Nearby Tips' when in Poole will see this review.
The Guardian wrote an article as a FourSquare user, have a read, as it explains the concept of Foursquare well: "Yesterday I took the tube into central London and walked to a random corner of Soho. I opened the app on my phone and went to the "nearby tips" section....."
Sharing with you, our top 5 reasons why hotel marketers should use FourSquare
1. Provides ability to send out offers and promotions, to local visitors, using FourSquare and interact with your customers Such as: @ Hotel Max: Come in, show our front desk that you checked in on Foursquare and get a $20 gift card to use towards your next stay and be entered into a raffle to win a free stay!
2. FourSquare can help hotels drive repeat business, as people come back to the same place to become ‘mayor’ (receiving a badge for number of check ins) and retain their position.
3. On search of local places it allows people to find out more about you from others, i.e. This hotel has the best Wi-Fi access in Poole, and allows the hotel owners to learn from peoples comments.
4. Enhances brand regonition via increased awareness within Twitter, as many Twitter users opt to link their Foursquare account with their Twitter account, if you see that one of the people you follow regularly ‘check in’ to a certain Hotel restaurant etc, then you may be interested to find out more.
5. We’ve recently seen the site HotelChatter adding Twitter mentions and Foursquare mentions of hotels to their site under a section called Hotel Social view their story here: They are also beginning to start a list of USA Hotels using FourSquare, we will be watching this list to view how they are using this geo locater social tool.
Want to know more about FourSquare and Social Media Networks, get in touch with the Flashlight team and talk to us further about social media strategies that would suit your business.
As it is operation sharing useful content on the blog this month, a couple of days ago we found this great article from Mashable on how to set up a Foursquare Special, which we just had to share with you.
We have also provided our own take on FourSquare specials for your review. Enjoy ;)
So what are the advantages of registering your business with them?
For starters, it’s a popular service, growing in numbers; in 2010 alone on their official blog, Foursquare reveals they experienced a 3400% increase in growth, and a staggering 381 million check ins.
Not only does signing your venue up on Foursquare open up a huge potential audience, but you can actively encourage visitors through Foursquare via the use of their ‘Foursquare Specials', from a Friends Special encouraging groups to a Newbie Special to encourage newcomers through your doors, there’s a wide range of potential deals to set up with the aim of encouraging people to check into your venue.
When it comes to promoting these specials, Foursquare can lend you a helping hand providing you with official window stickers, encouraging visitors to check in.
In addition to Specials, ownership of the venue on Foursquare will allow you to view a full set of real-time data about your customers. Imagine it like a real-life analytics! On your dashboard you’ll be able to see statistics such as total daily check-ins over time to viewing your most recent and frequent visitors and even whether they are broadcasting their check-ins to Twitter and Facebook.
Of course, whilst Foursquare might be one of the larger and (currently) in our opinion the best established of these services, it is by no means the only option! We’ve covered other location based marketing services as MePlease and Facebook Deals among others, in previous blog posts, both of which are more than worth a peruse. Enjoy ;)
Early this month Foursquare announced the revamped Foursquare for Business pages, complete with tools for merchants, venues and brands. We have been very excited about this development and thought it was about time to share the news with you guys.
We wrote about Foursquare back in June 2010: with the post 5 reasons hotels should be using the Geo location based portal. As a recap FourSquare allows you to virtual check-in to your location via your mobile phone (GPS), you can share reviews and tips with your FourSquare community, you can earn points, collect badges and discover new things and with your social network community at large. View the video here:
Now you have had time to digest the concept of Foursquare, back to the New Business Pages.
The objective of the pages is to help businesses owners attract new customers and maintain brand loyalty. There are two types of brand pages those for brands which have a physical location and those that are not tied to a physical location such as university, manufacturer. For those brands not tied to a physical location, here are the instructions for setting up a brand page on Foursquare: http://foursquare.com/business/brands
Currently Foursquare are making the brand pages manually at the request of partners, so if interested they invite you to download a form. News in the self service tool will be available to all very soon.
After your brand page is set up you can start leaving tips for your followers, a few examples from Foursquare are listed below:
The New York Times guided their foursquare followers to the best spots to visit while in Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Havaianas directed their followers to the best local spots to watch World Cup games, where they shared soccer trivia and gave away free flip-flops.
TravelOK.com helps their users unlock Oklahoma’s best-kept secrets, find discounts and discover hidden attractions throughout the state.
We (Flashlight Team) are increasingly being invited to create geo targeted campaigns for our clients. If you are interested in Geo location services or after viewing the above links perhaps you simply want to find out more about Foursquare and how it applies to your business then please get in touch with Rocktime Sales.
This month at Rocktime we’ve got our eye on local targeting, and April is our official “Operation Local Search Marketing” month! Local listings and local promotion sites will of course be of strongest benefit to those who wish to increase their local business reach.
Local is a pretty hot topic right now, and with good reason too as for starters, the Google Local Search Algorithm continues to evolve at a fast rate and recent reports indicate that 70% of users look for local information online first, and that 20% of all searches are location related. This month’s Geek Video was on “Google HotPot“ make sure you read the very latest (8th April 2011) news on why Google have decided to merge “HotPot” into their “Google Places” interface over at the Google Blog here.
The Google Places and HotPot merge also indicates there is much more to come with regards to reviews and recommendations within your Google Places account. Exciting times ahead!
Once you have optimised your Google Places account and devised a strategy plan for updates. You may be thinking where next? We hope that one day we will be able to say “We have a Local App for that!” however right now we haven’t. We do have a number of local directory websites that feed local search engines and we are also reviewing and engaging with local promotions sites and local social networks. Also when it comes to targeting your local market don’t forget about Geo Targeting options within paid search. It is a great feature, however our advice is for better ROI, opt for onsite local optimisation over paid-for models. You may wish to trial paid first though to review reach and potential for growth.
Having increased presence on local sites can create an environment for search engine rankings and support inclusion in a wide range of local apps and mapping software.
Local Targeted Website Research
We thought it would be interesting to find out the local targeted directory and local deal websites that the team at Rocktime use. As a team we have a 72% / 28% male/ female split, so in comparison to the UK online population as a whole which has a 52% / 48% male/female split, the results will be 20% Male biased.
Alice went round and quizzed the Rocktime staff on which local targeted sites they use and which they would consider using. A summary of the results are listed below.
If you’re interested in learning more about some of the following websites and apps, that are mentioned in the below results, we’ve talked about the majority of them previously on the Rocktime blog: such as Foursquare Deals, Facebook Deals, MePlease and Google HotPot.
As the chart shows, there’s a pretty equal mix and spread of the sites we picked out to ask about.
The ‘Other’ section entails services such as Think Local, The Best Of and Living Social to name a few. My Voucher Codes seems to be a fairly popular choice in the office, alongside the likes of globally popular sites such as Facebook.
The main finding from this research is the insight into the wide variety of local targeted websites we are using plus YELP (online Yellow Pages) and other local search engine pages were not mentioned once! The results indicate that as individuals we have not found one place yet in which to hang “our local targeted hat” with our friends. Perhaps with the developments on Google Places and the Google social share button (Google + 1) we will start to be more stream lined into where we go for local content and deals. Time will tell. We will review this again, same time next year.
Given the increasing popularity of the Local Targeting websites, it wouldn't suprise us if there's plenty more to choose from this time next year! Even now there's yet more sites popping up every month specialising in local deals and reviews, for example just last month Qype launched it's new (German) deals site, QypeDeals.
From the looks of it, here at Rocktime at least, Facebook Deals wins out over Foursquare. If you’re interested in reading more about the pros and cons between these two services then Social Media Examiner has put together a great comparison on its article Location-Based Services: Foursquare vs. Facebook Places.
If you require assistance connecting your business to local business talk to Rocktime’s Search Marketing (Flashlight) about bespoke local targeted campaigns. We hope you found our above research of interest, we certainly did and if you would like to share with us the local targeted websites that you visit or would recommend, then feel free to post a comment below.
We all know that Facebook is a master at ‘targeting’, be it by relationship, birthday or keyword and has built connection targeting tools like Fans, Applications, Groups and Events. It’s fair to say that Facebook is now set to dominate targeting by location.
I was encouraged to hear on Monday 31 January 2011 of the announcement that 'Facebook Deals' had launched in the UK, and thought to blog my opinion, as this year I will be very much focused on our 'Local Geo Targeted Search Campaigns'. I will seek to explain to you what this launch could mean for your business and why you should consider aligning Facebook Deals into your integrated marketing plans. Firstly I’ll provide a little introduction on what Facebook Deals is.
What is Facebook Deals? Facebook deals is an App that lets local businesses interact with Facebook users using Facebook Places, to check in to their physical shop or venue. The Facebook user is rewarded with incentivised promotions, discounts, loyalty schemes and offers when they visit the retailer. As you can probably imagine, the benefits for repeat purchases, customer engagement and brand loyalty are vast.
In summary, if you (as a user) have a Facebook Profile and have allowed access to the Facebook Places Application, then you can start to find out more about Facebook Deals in your area/close to your location.
You will just need to look out for a little yellow or green icon when you check into venues using Facebook Places, then click on the deal and claim it. Simple! The Facebook blog says: You'll see a few different types of Deals: individual deals for a discount, free merchandise or other reward; friend deals where you and your friends claim an offer together; loyalty deals for being a frequent visitor to a place; and charity deals where businesses pledge to donate to a cause when you check in.
If you are a business, then you may be interested to know that 50% of merchants who used Facebook Deals (in the US from Nov 2010 to start of year) have decided to renew their offers, and with millions of people using the service, we can only imagine that this has generated a positive ROI.
I will share some key points below.
Facebook deals for local businesses Facebook Deals has been developed as a marketing tool to not only lure customers but to repay them by for spreading the word about your business when they check in. As such, Facebook Deals needs to be treated like any aspect of an integrated marketing strategy. The actual time to physically create the deal has been nicely simplified by the clever developers at Facebook.
Other Geo Location Targeted Apps There are already other competitors in this geolocation market, most notably FourSquare which makes a shopping experience in to a reward-based mobile game. It’s all about rewarding the customer and building a stronger brand loyalty. Naturally, not all Facebook users will take up these offers but as our experience of the internet is increasingly defined by what our friends are logging, sharing and posting, then Facebook will be able to translate that experience into the real world.
Progressive move from places to deals Last year, we wrote about Facebook introducing Facebook Places a Facebook mobile application, which allows ‘out and about Facebook users’, with their smartphone, to let their network of friends know, in real time, about the locations they are visiting, and check their friends into those locations too. For businesses and brands that have a physical location it makes sense to target Facebook users that have a Facebook Place and offer them a deal if they come into the shop and participate in a promotion.
Once geolocation service; Facebook Places, was established, it was a logical progression to then start offering deals. These deals will become increasingly more personalised and competitive, especially when small, local businesses recognise the benefits of being found more easily, locally online and encouraging their customers to share information about themselves, in exchange for deals.
This is the real strength behind Facebook Deals; where a brand is able to really get to the core of what their customers are looking for in terms of service, interaction with the brand via social networks, relevant offers and preferred technologies. At the same time, customers that check in to the retailer have already allowed the brand full access to a wealth of personal information, directly from their Facebook profile i.e. gender, age, aspects of their social graph and shared information, which under other circumstances shoppers can be reluctant to divulge.
Facebook Deals allows retailers to get friendlier with their customers and allows the customers to share not just the pleasure of the purchased product but the whole shopping experience and with more than just the person sitting next to them. Geolocation targeting is here to stay!
Once the retailers have got their customer relations teams crunching the data on visits, successful campaigns, analytics and demographics you can be sure that the customers will be ‘rewarded’ with yet more tempting and targeted deals. Customers can expect much more than just a free cup of coffee. How about 20% off a Mazda MX for starters. Whatever the deal, retailers will now be very carefully considering Facebook Deals as part of their Integrated Marketing Plans and Mobile Strategy.
Some retailers ‘in’ on the launch include Argos, Benetton and Debenhams. Both Argos and Benetton are offering charity donations in return for checkins by customers”
Find out more about Facebook Places For additional options: a few articles that we have bookmarked on 'Facebook Deals launching in the UK' are listed below, we particularly like the comments made by Andrew Grill from London Calling, where he talks about 'Foursquare Fatique' and what it means for the just launched Facebook Deals service in the UK.
The Flashlight Team would be very happy to talk to you further about how you can integrate Facebook into your marketing plans, we look forward to hearing from you.
Hot on the coat tails of social media’s current love affair with Pinterest, come a handful of start ups that have all kicked off in 2012. Some less subtle then others! Let’s take a quick look at just a handful of them.
“Social Travel” has been growing in leaps and bounds. As everything seems to follow Pinterest in trending towards more visual approaches to content; we’re seeing a lot of similarly styled sites popping up.
Trippy recently redesigned its site to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon. Users can now create travel boards and can pin images to them, comment, and also choose to tag their images with “Want to go” or “been there”.
Though originally launched some 3 years ago, just earlier this month, the visual-travel-discovery site, Wanderfly, redesigned and re launched their site. Gtrot, another social travel site has also opted for a more visual focused design update, with similar photo uploading and recommendations.
The majority of items pinned on Fancy come straight from ecommerce stores, so a ‘Buy it’ button takes users straight to the merchant's page
Users can also purchase items directly from the Fancy site, involving merchants more directly in the process. This requires merchants to find items that users have fancied, when they find something that they stock the merchant can place a bid to sell that particular item, through Fancy, by using the ‘I want to sell it’ button.
Pingram.me sells itself as a mash up of Instagram and Pinterest, though you’d be hard pushed to tell the difference between it and the latter of those two at a glance. The major difference between the two is that pinning on Pingram is only enabled on photos taken by other Pingram users. This approach is intended to both respect Pinterest etiquette and protect other Instagram users from having their images shared unknowingly.
Now moving momentarily back to the world of Social Travel, but refreshingly un-Pinterest like, we have this new site, Tripbirds. Rather than relying on friends to create content, Tripbirds instead organises geotagged content from other friends on different platforms, which at the moment includes popular media such as Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram.
Mashable has kindly outlined ‘9 social networks to watch’; such as Path, Highlight, Sonar, Banjo, Glancee, Localmind, Forecast, Gogobot and Fancy which we mentioned above. All these social networks are trying to win an audience over from Facebook, yet trying not to become too similar to Facebook; which already offers some very similar features to these new start-ups and has the added bonus of being used by many of the businesses we work with and certainly all our friends.
Of course, whilst spreading your influence is important, getting on board every social media fad that pops up isn’t a constructive use of time and effort. If you’re interested in investing into social media and discovering where to focus your efforts, why not get in contact with Rocktime and talk to our Flashlight team about discovering a Social media strategy tailored for you.
MePlease has announced the launch of its social media and mobile platform, which enables businesses to connect with customers on their mobile, along with offering very easy social media sharing. This integrated social media and mobile platform, will help transform relationships between businesses and customers via social media & mobile marketing.
We are very excited indeed !!
Last week we heard (via: New Media Age) that MePlease had partnered with Pizza Express to help power the voting of their recent “Create Your Pizza Challenge”. If you happen to visit a Pizza Express Restaurant between 18th October to November 14th, you may note an on table display to vote for one of five pizza finalists. People participating will also have the option to post their opinion directly to Facebook, to further encourage viral spread for the brand.
Why not pop into a Pizza Express next week and try it out, alternatively view this video for a demonstration on how Me Please works in situ.
Although MePlease is similar to sites such as FourSquare (which we blogged about back in June), the difference about MePlease is, that it's largely powered by SMS, so it will work on any phone (ie; not just smart phones), suiting both National brands and small businesses.
MePlease is such a great idea !! Secretly wish it was ours...
The mobile platform provides business to customer engagement via voting, competitions, generate customer feedback and will also encourage customer acquisition, retention and most importantly drive footfall. A number of high street names have already signed up, and as we consider letting our clients know about this portal, we are keeping up to date with the Me Please news over at their blog: http://mepls.wordpress.com/
The only critique we would give is the name ‘me please’ as you can imagine a lot of people saying this in social media (which will appear in search engines). “can you review this site for me please”, “can you look at this link for me please” etc...However after writing that, although Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) would help if you had heard about the brand and wanted to be part of it, SEO wouldn’t be as relevant as the activity would be virally spread.
Interesting stuff....
If you want to discuss more about mobile marketing and social media strategies and how they could fit with your business, feel free to call the Rocktime Flashlight team, so they can then view your integrated approach potential.
Expect over the next six months to start to see a major growth in development of iPhone applications.
The stats to support this include:
607.5 million people globally accessing social networks by 2013, which is 43% of all mobile internet users (eMarketer)
50% of mobile phone users will access the mobile internet at least monthly by 2013 (eMarketer)
Also recent studies (from America) shows the % of people accessing websites via mobile phones are increasing: in January 2010, 25.1 million mobile users accessed Facebook via their mobile browser, up 112% from 11.8 million mobile users in January 2009. Twitter also experienced high growth attracting 4.7 million mobile user in Jan 10, up by 347% versus previous year. (Source: ComScore, Feb 2010, Facebook and Twitter Access via Mobile Browser Grows by Triple-Digits in the Past Year).
Content on the go
If your consumers/clients would benefit from content on the go being pushed to their phone (via 3GS) then talk to Rocktime Sales about Mobile Application development. We can create mobile applications for the iPhone, Android, Windows mobile and more. A benefit of working with us is that as we develop everything in house you will also be able to have complete control of the look and the feel of the application. The main design considerations we review to in creating your application with you, is to make sure it is easy to read, easy to navigate, fun or/and extremely useful to target market.
Recent iPhone development
Rocktime recently developed an iPhone application for Local Food Advisor linking into their site database, to share 4000 award winning producers, suppliers and farmers markets in the UK & Ireland read more about the iPhone app integration here>
How to get your app noticed?
There are over 100K 3rd party applications available to download, so the big question is how to get your application noticed? As part of social media optimisation we would advise you to network with your communities on social networks before launch and during launch. If the application development was based on feedback from your community then thank them and make them feel involved, they too will then share the love of your new application. If you have employees on Twitter talk to them about the new app let them know test dates, let them spread the word too around their own networks. Join in with application developer forums, get their feedback and continue to spread awareness of your application once launched.
Location based apps growing
Tech journalists and bloggers anticipate an increasing number of iPhone applications will become location based: so as tweets, blog posts, site content are based on a specific area the content will then be delivered to the iPhone application when required. On upload of the application it will ask “would you like to use your current location”, you may have already seen this already on sites such as http://gowalla.com/ and http://foursquare.com/ (see above blog post image).
Via 3GS and interaction with the location targeted apps, local businesses are benefiting as they are able to serve up adverts that are specific to the application users location ie: a coffee shop may tweet out to Four Square members, “Why not pop in to our branch on the High Street around 3pm and have Coffee for half price”. Pretty amazing yes, indication that web technology is continuing to empower the consumer even further, as they not only check for real time offers whilst on the move but receive them automatically too (Push & Pull notifications).
Be inspired
It is worth your while exploring iPhone applications even if you don’t have an iPhone, what works well on a phone could work for your site. The application store is also a great place to help create or build on new ideas, especially if you read the feedback pages.
If you are totally new to mobile phone applications and would like a little insight into how they function. look and the benefits to the user, we would recommend you go visit this post at Mashable, who in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, shared their top 10 free iPhone applications that promote continued environmental awareness, hopefully they will be of interest to you. For extra advise and guidance in this growing market of mobile phone applications pick up the phone to talk to Rocktime Sales.
This blog post is in celebration of the Google Panda Update. Google Panda has a quest to filter out low quality and duplicate pages from the Google search pages. The algorithms are searching for pages that are deemed ‘not useful’ to search engine visitors.
This month we have provided you (our readers), with information that we deem to be useful, answering some of the common questions from our clients. (Note: More information will be shared on Panda in June, as I have a feeling Matt Cutts Live Q&A (aired this week) featuring Google Panda, will make the Geek Video of the month!).
To put it bluntly several website owners were pretty annoyed by Panda, as they saw their positions decrease, so you may be wondering why we are celebrating the news. Three reasons:
1. Our blog received a 10% uplift in traffic once the update hit the UK, so it all very positive. (Note: There were other algorithm tweaks following the Panda update, so may not be totally related).
2. We have also been highlighting to our clients for some time now to stay away from duplicate content, make their content compelling and of interest to their site visitors. So they are happy.
3. It indicates that Google are much more focused on delivering the best experience for their site users, and if this means better sites, then this is more fun for us.
Rocktime Useful Content
The useful content that we have shared with our readers and our clients on the blog this month include:
During our Useful Content month in May, we would also like to introduce our NEW Useful Tools page. The objective of this page is to share with you a selection of our in-house tools to assist you with their search marketing plans, campaign planning and analytic reviews of performance.
Please do go and try the tools out and if you find them useful then please spread the love of our efforts and share with your friends and colleagues ;)
The tools currently present on the Useful Tools page include:
As a team of Digital Marketing Consultants we are here to help you achieve growth (sales, visitors, awareness, engagement) in your digital field. Feel free to talk to the Flashlight Search Marketing team further about how we can work alongside you on your digital strategy plans.
Author: Sarah Griffiths
Credit for the above image goes to Original Toys UK, and can be purchased from here.
The Rocktime team aim to keep you up to date with the latest in digital trends. Blog posts relate to web developments, mobile, e-commerce, search marketing, social media and all things Geek. Feel free to join in the conversation.
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